Search This Blog

Linux has arrived

When I first saw Linux in a dorm at MIT in 1995, I knew it was important. I wanted desperately to have an extra computer to put it on and learn it. Like most students I used my University's Unix main-frame for email to which I connected remotely from various computer cluster or labs across campus. Unix was completely different from windows or Mac OS, command line driven and was where the internet was. Back in those PC days the internet ran almost exclusively on Unix, if you wanted email, you had to use it.

Linux was an Operating System that allowed you to run a Unix shell clone on your personal computer instead of a huge mainframe or through a terminal. It was both great because it was completely configurable and free, but also a nightmare. You had to know a lot to really use it, and essentially needed an extra computer for it.

Around that time the internet moved away from Unix and into the web, and browsers. Netscape and Internet Explorer became the prime ways of interacting with the internet, and the necessity of Linux waned.

In the early-oughts I discovered something very cool. That Linux was now able to dual boot, so you could have it side-by-side Windows. This was great. I'd used the NeXT OS (NeXTStep) which later became the basis of Mac OS X and knew that Linux was a way to learn about the underlying system of Mac OS too. The more I looked into Linux with now easy-to-configure and free distributions like Fedora (Red Hat's community version) or openSuse (Novell Suse's community version) the more I thought this was going to take off big. As a person who has never pirated an operating system I feel the expense of getting one as quite significant. And I thought the model of open source would lead to great software.

And it sort of did. Linux came to dominate Servers. The computers that run the internet, displacing the previous Unix main-frames. But in the user space it remained marginal. Even with Ubuntu's massive success, it still remained in the fringes. But no more.

Linux and BSD (another open source Unix clone that lies at the heart of Mac OS) dominate the tablets.

Amazon's Kindle runs Linux, HP's WebOS is Linux, Google's Android is Linux, and Apple's iOS runs Mac OS (which is build on top of BSD, and very similar to Linux). So while none of this systems allow user direct access to the system OS, that I think will be a matter of time.

Get link

Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Google+

Email

Other Apps

Labels

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Typing accents on a PC is a complicated Alt + three numbered code affair. One feels like a sorcerer casting a spell. "I summon thee accented é! I press the weird magical key Alt, and with 0191 get the flipped question mark!" For a bilingual person this meant that writing on the computer was a start-and-stop process. With Mac's it a whole lot easier, just Alt + e and the letter you wanted for accents and alt + ? for the question mark. No need to leave the keyboard for the number pad and no need to remember arcane number combinations or have a paper cheat sheet next to the keyboard, as I've seen in virtually every secretaries computer in Puerto Rico.

Linux has a interesting approach to foreign language characters: using a compose key. You hit this key which I typically map to Caps Lock and ' and the letter you want and voilá you get the accent. Kinda makes sense: single quotation mark is an accent, double gets you the ümalaut, works pretty well. Except for the ñ, wh…

There is interestingly enough a big difference between what's considered good writing in Spanish and English. V.S. Naipul winner of the 2001 Nobel prize for literature publish an article on writing. In it he emphasizes the use of short clear sentences and encourages the lack of adjectives and adverbs. Essentially he pushes the writer to abandon florid language and master spartan communication. This is a desired feature of English prose, where short clipped sentences are the norm and seamlessly flow into a paragraph. In English prose the paragraph is the unit the writer cares about the most.

This is not the case in Spanish where whole short stories (I'm thinking this was Gabriel Garcia Marquez but maybe it was Cortázar) are written in one sentence. Something so difficult to do in English that the expert translator could best manage to encapsulate the tale in two sentences. The florid language is what is considered good writing in Spanish but unfortunately this has lead to what …

I really like Github's Atom Text Editor. I really like that it's multi-platform allowing me to master one set of skills that is transferable to all platforms and all machines.

On thing that just burns me of the default set-up in Atom is the Autocomplete feature that seems to change my words as a type them. Because Ruby uses the end of line as a terminus for a statement you usually finish a word with pressing the return button and you get really annoying changes to your finished typed word a la MS Word. I find myself yelling "No that's not what I wrote!" at the screen in busy coffee shops.

I disabled autocomplete for a while but it is a very useful function. Then I found out they changed the package that gave the autocomplete to a new one called "Autocomplete Plus" that gives you more options. All that I needed to change to make autocomplete sane again: